“The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”

“Barrett's characters must, like short story writers, work within the limitations of form and of place.”

“Kelly began to suspect postal workers of stealing the postcards.”

Sometimes we inhabit all the tenses and eras at once.

In 1976, twenty-five-year-old Wendy Ewald rented a small house in remote eastern Kentucky, hoping to make a photographic document of “the soul and rhythm of the place.”

Readers want to believe in a “real” person as much as children want to believe in the tooth fairy.

  More than a decade ago, on a Fulbright fellowship in Ukraine, the artist Carolyn Drake found herself outside Ternopil, a small city on the banks of the Seret River. Her hosts led her to a forest on the edge of a suburb, where a large, half-centu…

  The photographs in Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, which have just been published in a new edition, contain a freedom-seeking, derelict melancholy: deceptively clean, silver early-morning surfaces, a mattress floating in a swampy puddle…

Glen Campbell was the perfect articulator of Portis’s defiantly at-odds small-town characters and their old-fashioned dreams.

Jerry McGill: Sun Records artist, Memphis fixture, and “crazy sonofabitch.”Jerry McGill by the numbers, hazy as they may be: He cut one 45 for Sun Records (the rockabilly “Lovestruck,” with a backing band that included Charlie Rich). Years later,…

Lovers on the run tend to travel light. Generally speaking, in our collective imagination, accoutrements tend to be limited to car (probably stolen), gun (also stolen), clothes on their backs. Yet Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (captured i…